Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
in the Puritan character did not escape Whittier’s eye, but they
appear in the sketches of avaricious deacons, sour women, intolerant
magistrates--the Deacon Doles and Goody Lakes and Roger Endicotts,
whose bigotry tyrannized over the better natures of the community.
Whittier sifted his materials carefully to gather up what good wheat
there might be, yet the showing it must be confessed is but paltry.
Honest Robert Pine who will have none unjustly treated, good Mr.
Russ who counsels moderation in dealing with the unhappy victims of
mob suspicion. Captain Samuel Sewall who speaks up bravely for the
outcast--these are the remnant in Israel, the generous minority that
cannot leaven the dour and credulous mass. Yet even they are not heroic
figures to Whittier. His heroes are the Come-outers, and in particular
Peggy Brewster--reminiscent evidently of his great-grandmother, the
Quakeress Mary Peaslee, who married Robert Whittier in 1694--who is the
good Samaritan of the Puritan neighborhood, and whose loving-kindness
wins a reluctant good will that stops short of toleration of her
non-conformity.
Such intimate studies in the psychology of persecution were a liberal
education, and Whittier would have been no Quaker had he not learned
his lesson. He was justified in not thinking well of the social
conscience of respectable New England. Religious conformity, he
had come to understand, had not kept alive the torch of freedom in
Massachusetts, nor had Puritan righteousness befriended justice. Not
the great of earth but the simple may be counted on to do God’s work.
So taking his lesson to heart he quietly put aside ambition, and like
Peggy Brewster numbered himself among the remnant. Like her he would
be a Come-outer and bear his testimony against the uncleanness of the
American people in this matter of negro slavery. Not with musket and
ball would he fight, like old John Brown; but with the sword of the
spirit. The solution must lie with the conscience of the American
people. As a Friend, a man of peace, he would not deal harshly with
the supporters of slavery; he would not counsel violence. But as
a Yankee with a gift for politics, he would use political means to
jog a slothful conscience and marshal its forces. And so Whittier
became the politician amongst the Abolitionists. He proved himself a
skillful lobbyist. He was active in getting up petitions to Congress.
He supported John Quincy Adams and put pressure on the slippery Caleb
Cushing. He advocated the policy of boring from within the old parties,
but when such methods proved futile he became an active leader in
the third party movement. He was an early supporter of the Liberal
party--that in 1844 drew enough votes from Clay in New York to defeat
him for the Presidency--of the Free-Soil party, and later of the
Republican party.
It was this insistence upon the use of political methods that brought
about the unhappy break with Garrison. Immediately it was no more
than a difference over tactics, but it was embittered by a wide
cleavage of political theory. With Garrison’s conversion to spiritual
anarchism the Abolition movement was sundered by a division between
the perfectionists and the political actionists. The principle of
non-voting and of refusing allegiance to the Constitution aroused
strong opposition, and Whittier went with Birney and Gerrit Smith,
with Jonathan Sewall, John Pierpont and the Tappans in rejecting the
perfectionist policy. His political common sense turned naturally to
political agencies to accomplish his ends. “Moral action apart from
political” seemed to him an “absurdity.” But when he applied the Quaker
principle of Come-outism, and advocated separate party alignment.
Garrison attacked him with his habitual intolerance. The latter feared
a third party movement as certain to provide a rallying cry for the
commercial interest to muster the mob to its support, and overwhelm
the minority with the unthinking and selfish mass. “All political
minorities,” he argued, “are more or less liberal,” and by throwing
the Abolition strength to such organized minorities, the movement
would be “feared and respected by all political parties” (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 310-311). The wisest strategy,
he believed, was to seek to hold the balance of power between the old
parties--rewarding friends and punishing enemies--while laboring to
arouse the conscience of America, for ballots without conscience were
the enemies of justice.
Whittier was no such root-and-branch spirit as Garrison, and in
the political field he was a practical, somewhat prosaic Yankee,
little given to abstract speculation, skillful in minor strategical
skirmishes, inclined to opportunism. He belonged to no school of
political thought. His equalitarianism came as a heritage from his
Quaker religion rather than from political theory. To prepare himself
for his work he read Milton and Burke. The pamphlets of the great
Puritan appealed to him as the voice of the moral fervor of a heroic
age, but Milton’s aristocratic republicanism he seems to have examined
no more critically than Burke’s Whiggish legalism. Neither held
anything in common with Quaker equalitarianism. Rousseau and Tom Paine
and Jefferson, with whom he certainly would have sympathized, he seems
not to have been acquainted with. In Whittier’s New England they were
in ill repute, and the young Whittier was as naïvely provincial in
his political partisanship as was Garrison. Economics had no part in
his thought, and the economic interests that divided Federalism and
Anti-Federalism he seems never to have understood. Though sprung from
six generations of farmers who tilled the same acres, he reveals no
sympathy with agrarianism. He swallowed Clay and the American System
without a qualm, and as a young editor he wrote with pride of the
developing industrialism of Massachusetts. Neither in politics nor
in economics was he a rebellious soul. He was conscience rather than
intellect. He felt rather than thought. Only a moral issue could draw
him into strife, and even in such contests he was ill equipped to lead
the prosaic debates. His moral indignation found its natural expression
in verse, and he early took his place as the poet of the Abolition
movement, distilling into ready lyrics the emotion of the moment.
A great, even a noteworthy poet, Whittier certainly was not. Compared
with Whitman he is only a minor figure. Among the better known American
poets Bryant alone is so narrow in range and barren in suggestion. His
austere and meager life bred too little sensuousness of nature and
too few intellectual passions. An over-frugal watering of the wine of
paganism had left the New England character thin. The sap of humor that
ran so boisterously through the veins of the West, exuding a rough wit
from Davy Crockett to Mark Twain, was quite gone out of the Yankee
blood. His homely imagination was unquickened by a hearty village life
as was the case with the English Bunyan and the Scotch Burns. He had
become a bundle of Yankee nerves, responding only to moral stimuli.
The comment of Whitman sums up the Quaker poet adequately:
Whittier’s poetry stands for morality ... as filtered through the
positive Puritanical and Quaker filters; is very valuable as a
genuine utterance.... Whittier is rather a grand figure--pretty
lean and ascetic--no Greek--also not composite and universal enough
(doesn’t wish to be, doesn’t try to be) for ideal Americanism.
(Carpenter, _Life of Whitman_, p. 293.)
Never a great artist, rarely a competent craftsman, he wrote for the
most part impassioned commonplace, with occasional flashes that are not
commonplace.
The high-water mark of lyric indignation was reached in the lines to
Webster. Written at white heat, they have the passionate directness
of Thoreau’s prose. Like other Abolitionists, Whittier had clung
to his hopes of Webster in spite of frequent signs of the latter’s
backsliding. He did not sufficiently appreciate the economic
alliances that tied Webster to State Street, and he underrated his
presidential ambitions. But when the blow came with the Seventh of
March Speech, it staggered him--not alone the defection of Webster,
but the demonstrative approval of his wealthy constituents. For having
“convinced the understanding and touched the conscience of a nation,”
Webster was formally thanked by some seven hundred addressers from
the most respectable circles of Massachusetts--great men like Rufus
Choate, George Ticknor, W. H. Prescott, President Jared Sparks and
Professor Felton of Harvard, Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods of Andover
Theological Seminary. It was an hour of profound discouragement that
laid bare what colossal difficulties stood in the way of Abolitionism.
“The scandalous treachery of Webster and the _backing_ he has received
from Andover and Harvard,” wrote Whittier to Garrison, “show that we
have nothing to hope for from the great political parties and religious
sects” (William Sloane Kennedy, _John G. Whittier_, p. 113).
The scathing lines of _Ichabod_ were read throughout the North, and
they must have rankled in Webster’s heart. Even Whittier was troubled
by their severity and thirty years later he wrote a second Webster
poem which he set beside _Ichabod_ in his collected works. _The Lost
Occasion_ is a testimony to the kindliness of Whittier’s Quaker heart
that did not love to offend; but no kindliness of memory could change
or soften the just verdict of the lines:
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel’s pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.
All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul is fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
If Whittier was ill acquainted with the Boston of State Street
and the Back Bay, and the Cambridge of Harvard culture, he knew
intimately the Massachusetts of the village and the farm, and the
overwhelming repudiation of Webster and the Whig party, following
the Seventh of March Speech, would seem to have justified his lyric
confidence expressed in the vigorous heptameters of _Massachusetts to
Virginia_. For those who lived in the social world of Commissioner
Loring--professor of law at Harvard--and Rufus Choate, it was hard
not to think that Massachusetts had come to degenerate days. The fine
old-school Federalist, Josiah Quincy, commenting on the Boston that
watched Sims returned to slavery, wrote:
When the [Fugitive Slave] law passed, I did think the moral sense
of the community would not enforce it; I said that it never
would be. But now I find that my fellow-citizens are not only
_submissive_ to, but that they are earnestly active for, its
enforcement. The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston
has now become a mere shop--a place for buying and selling goods;
and I suppose, also, of _buying and selling men_. (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. III, p. 328.)
And Lowell, living in the same mean atmosphere, wrote:
Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She’s akneelin’ with the rest,
She, thet ough’ to ha’ clung ferever
In her grand old eagle-nest.
(_Biglow Papers_, Part I, 1.)
But Whittier professed to think better of the conscience of New
England. A strong pride of the commonwealth runs through the lines
that name over the towns of Massachusetts, from “free, broad
Middlesex,” westward and northward to the hills of Hampshire:
And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay!
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,